The Gift

We played all of the Red Door games at this location in one day, with a team of two. The team was very accommodating in helping us make that happen. The rooms looked great, and the storylines were good. I love that these are all taking place in the same universe with crossover characters and references. Gives each plot a sense of well, “being part of something bigger” in a nice way. That said the game play had many many things wrong with it. Enough that the whole experience wound up being unenjoyable. We had several tech issues, including one room where the mics were not working, so they could hear us at all and another where a key audio visual clue would not play and so the just gave us the solution to a puzzle which we were never presented with at all - calling it a “free clue”. There were many combination locks, with no signposting as to what solution went where so you had to try every combo you found in all locks. There were a few puzzles that didn’t make sense and when we asked for help they would just give the next combination to enter our n a lock rather than an actual hint - so that even after solving the room we had to ask for explanations after the game was over to know how the puzzles were supposed to have been solved. (In all cases there was something was not clued.) The volume on the rules and backstory videos was such that you would hear them annoyingly loudly when you were in the room already and they were onboarding another team. Oh, and the Red Herrings! There were puzzles in the games that did nothing. Set up in such a way that you weren’t sure if something happened when you solved, or if maybe there was another tech glitch, or what. They were literally there to waste the players time and annoy them! Why?! And the conclusions were not, well conclusive. There was no “bookend”. In several games we were only aware that we had finished the game because we looked up at the screen and noticed the timer had stopped. A little polish and an attempt to entertain players rather that “beat” them, and these could be great rooms. But as they were run when we played, I can’t recommend them.

The room is very hard. very cool room, you have to really look around and connect the dots. I didn’t like that there’s limited hints and the hint system was not the best. They gave us hints on things we already did and I do wish the game master talked to us instead of reading the hints on a screen.